So she was much surprised, the following summer, when she heard that a new family was occupying her former home.
"If it's a small family they'll get along well enough," she remarked to Aunt Polly Woodchuck, who had told her the news.
"Small!" Aunt Polly exclaimed, lifting both her hands (with the black mitts on them) high in the air. "They say it's a dreadful big family—at least two hundred of 'em, so I've been told."
Well, for a moment Mrs. Field Mouse couldn't say a word, she was so astonished. Then she managed to gasp:
"What's their name?"
"I declare, I can't just remember," said Aunt Polly Woodchuck. "But it's a name that rhymes with apple tree—though that's not quite it.... They're a very musical family, I understand. My nephew, Billy Woodchuck, passed right by their door only yesterday; and he says he heard music and the sound of dancing from inside the house."
"Two hundred of them dancing in that little house!" cried Mrs. Field Mouse. "Why, it's positively dangerous! I should think they'd trample one another."
And Aunt Polly Woodchuck agreed, before she went off towards her home under the hill, that there were queer goings-on over there in the meadow.
Later she sent her nephew Billy to tell Mrs. Field Mouse that on her way home she had remembered the name of the big family. It was Bumblebee.
"They must be an odd lot," Mrs. Field Mouse remarked to her husband. "Farmer Green's meadow is becoming more unfashionable than ever. And I shall never regret having moved away from there."